


sometimes wonder what's beneath the mess you've become

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Baseball, F/M, a slut for love, freds a slut but like.... an emotional slut, honestly fred's awkwardly hooked up with all of his high school flames at some point so, kitchen makeouts, parentdale, this makes no sense with the timeline of the show, what the hell am i doing, why am i like this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 01:49:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11864130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: Someone asked me a long time ago if i could write adult fred and alice and i really didn't think i could (i'm still not convinced i did with any degree of virtue) but if you're here for a good time not a long time, take it, it's yours.orAlice and Fred play catch, drink lemonade, and take advantage of the situation.





	sometimes wonder what's beneath the mess you've become

**Author's Note:**

> title from "dirty little girl" by elton john which was probably playing while they made out

“Having a garage sale, Fred?”

It’s the  _ degrees in the shade  _ kind of hot, an endless overripe Friday afternoon. The sky overhead is infinite and blue, dotted with full, white clouds. Fred looks up from one of the stacks of storage bins that decorate his lawn, a nerf gun in each hand. 

“Looking for my catcher’s mitt.” He sets the guns down beside a bucket of sidewalk chalk. “I think we must have lost it in the move.” 

Alice snorts and slams her car door. “If it’s the one I’m thinking of, it’s just as well.” 

“Be nice,” Fred chides her. “That served me well.” 

She comes and stands with him then, hovering on the property line, the subtle place where Fred’s new-mown yard gives way to the greener, lusher lawn on the Cooper house. She holds her purse from the top part of the strap so that the bottom of the bag barely skims the fronds of grass. Her purse today is a sky-blue leather - Alice had many purses for many occasions while Mary had only ever used one until it wore out. 

He sees her eyes skim over the mess laid out on the grass, cataloging. It reminds him of the game they used to play at birthday parties before they were old enough to talk about sex - a tray of little objects, uncovered and re-covered with a tea-towel. You had sixty seconds or so to remember what was on it. 

“You have plans for today?” He asks, knees creaking as he stands up. It’s an attempt at neighbourly chitchat - on a day like this it seems impossible that anyone shouldn’t. The sky is endless over them. He envies Archie, who won’t be home until six because of football practice - it was a day for football. 

“Just running errands.” She watches him uncover two fielder’s gloves and toss them on the ground, dissatisfied. “This looks like a full day project for you.” 

“I’ll find a place for everything one of these days.” 

“Well, garbage day is tomorrow.” 

It should be a parting quip, thrown out as a final barb as she turns neatly to head inside her own home, but she lingers a bit longer on his lawn, looking over the mess of camping gear on the grass with something unreadable in her gaze. Fred scoops up a wayward baseball and holds it up to show her. 

“You still throw a mean curveball?” 

Alice raises an eyebrow. “Are you looking to find out?” 

Fred tosses a glove at her. 

* * *

They move to the backyard, because Alice would rather not be seen by the neighbours. Fred doubts they’d bother to talk - if there was such thing as a queen bee of the neighbourhood, Alice was it, and a little game of catch wouldn’t challenge that - but he humours her because there’s more space for throwing. Alice steps neatly out of her low-heeled shoes and works the sheer material of her stockings down her legs, folding them and tucking them in her purse so she can stand barefoot on the lawn.

“I’ll wait if you want to grab some new shoes,” Fred offers, but Alice just smirks and tosses the ball at him. 

They pace out so that they’re fifty feet apart, Alice examining the stiff leather of her glove, slamming a couple punches into it so that the hard, satisfying clap of skin on leather fills the space between them. 

Fred throws the ball hard into his glove a few times to loosen it up before rearing back with one hand. 

“Here it comes.” 

Alice catches it easily, with nothing more than a subtle flick of the wrist to get her glove in the way. “Not bad,” she admits, picking the ball out of her glove. 

“Haven’t totally lost my touch.” He holds his glove out as Alice rotates the ball in her fingers, searching for a grip. “Burn it home.” 

The response fires so sharply into his glove that it stings his palm. He takes a couple steps backward, unbalanced, and Alice grins like the teenager she used to be, pleased to have knocked him off guard. 

“Archie ever throw you one like that?” 

Fred laughs and whips it back at her - it goes high and crooked, but she gets her glove there in time and catches it in the pocket with a neat  _ whap _ . 

He misses Archie’s youth all at once - Alice unpacking whole flats of orange slices from the back of her minivan while he paced the dugout in his coach’s hat, the one the whole team would sign at the end of the year in sharpie, careful to print their little league numbers beneath their names as though it would mean something someday. Archie wore #33 for two consecutive years, and Fred remembers the care with which he’d handle the jersey doing the washing, as though he too believed how strongly it mattered. Betty wore #14, which was Fred’s lucky number - he’d told her that once. She’d stopped playing baseball once the boys were old enough to be mean to her - traded it in for other interests, reading, writing, auto mechanics, a brief stint on a girl’s basketball team in middle school. But sometimes on days Hal got home late from the Register, she’d join him and Archie in the front yard for a throw. Alice told him once that it bugged Hal when Fred played catch with her, and he’d obediently backed off. It made him sad not to join them, but he understood. Dads were territorial. 

He’s ready to catch it this time, but still has to hide a wince as the ball connects hard with his palm. Alice threw sizzlers in a way Betty never had, in a way even Fred had never learned to mimic. Archie’s throw was a graceful underhand or a wobbly slider, and Fred isn’t used to the speed at which Alice’s ball connects with his glove. 

“You know,” he says as he throws it back, “we were the best catchers at Riverdale High.”

“We had to be.” There’s a wry, familiar smile in her voice - the way they used to rib each other, before the town went to shit. She catches it easily and returns it, an arrow-straight trajectory from her hand to his glove. “No one else would play the position.” 

“I don’t know why you gave up pitching. You were amazing.” 

“Had to raise a family. It’s too bad.” She puts a bit of a curve on this one, so that he has scoop it up just above the grass. “Could be in the majors by now.” 

The conversation dwindles then, and they only throw, and catch, throw and catch, a comforting repetitiveness that’s as soothing as it is natural. The sun hangs hot and heavy over the two of them, though Alice doesn’t seem to break a sweat. He feels an odd, tugging sense of freedom, a blissful falling away of everything but the glove and the sun and the periodic sting of a particularly cruel fastball. They back up to put more distance between them, and then move in closer again. They haven’t dropped one yet, and as the sun moves above them it’s clear they’re not going to. He could be seven again, in the sandlot by their park, letting Alice pummel his glove with pitches. 

“Time out,” he says, when the sun has slipped to one side of the sky and his back is damp with sweat. 

Her blue eyes flash with indignation. “Time out?” 

“Lemonade break.” 

Alice snorts and sends one last perfect pitch into his glove, suddenly and obstinately possessing the attitude of a high-schooler. “Only you, Fred.” 

* * *

She accepts the glass of lemonade gratefully, leaning back against the counter. Fred had forgotten what she was wearing: her neat blazer and straight skirt are so perfectly befitting the tidy suburban confines of his kitchen that he feels briefly like the outsider. She shakes out her hair and it shines in the light through his window. 

“You look good, Alice.” 

“Lost the hundred and sixty pound weight around my neck.” She fans herself neatly with one hand, still in bare feet. “Archie coming home soon?” 

“Not until later. He has football.” He tries to decide if he should answer the quip about Hal, and compromises by holding his drink out to her. She offers him her own, the liquid lapping at the tilted lip of the glass without spilling. “Cheers.” 

They clink their lemonade glasses. It sounds final. 

Alice lifts her blonde hair off the back of her neck as she drinks, throat working as she swallows. He tries to picture her sixteen, chugging beers by a campfire, but it’s harder in this kitchen with their gloves forgotten on the lawn out back. He can feel the adulthood creeping back into the two of them, feels her stiffen slightly with it, settle her defenses back in place. 

“Refill?” he asks, gesturing to her empty glass, realizing she’s going to leave him soon, pretend they’d never played ball, let him sit around and wait for Archie to get home. He could always boot up the laptop, do the paperwork he’s been neglecting, only it’s a football day, and he’d rather be outside. 

Alice drops her curtain of hair so that it settles back around her neck. “Please.” 

He gets the jug out of the fridge and empties it into her glass over the sink, tops his own up while he’s at it. The liquid seems to crackle as it spills over the ice: the sun glitters in the clear faux-glass of the pitcher, making little dancing rainbows spread like water droplets on the skin of his arm. It’s too nice of a day for paperwork. Maybe he’ll build something. Have a birdhouse or something finished for when Archie got home. 

He turns around, a glass in each hand, and Alice is right there. “Sorry,” he apologizes quickly, setting his own glass down on the counter to readjust his grip on hers. 

“Sorry,” she echoes quietly, though she doesn’t step back, eyes trained on his face. It’s then that he realizes that his back is against the counter, and that he hasn’t moved any closer to her. 

Alice’s fingers are cold from the glass when they reach his wrist, gently pressing her fingerprints just above his pulse point. She’s staring up at his face, shorter than him in bare feet, eyes the same cool, unending blue of the sky under perfect blonde brows. 

“Al-” he begins anxiously, moving sideways toward the fridge. She moves with him. He lowers the hand holding the glass and she moves even closer so that he can smell her: the clean lavender of her shampoo, the sun from outside, the smell of home that clings to her clothes. Her breasts press against the front of his chest. 

“Alice,” His voice comes out a dry-mouthed whisper. “What are you-” 

“Don’t play dumb, Fred, it doesn’t suit you.” Her eyes are on his lips. 

He still doesn’t move, frozen, and she smiles humorlessly. 

“You’re thinking about Mary,” she says, running one hand up his arm, fingers still cold and wet. 

“No,” he answers honestly. 

“Then what?” 

“I’m thinking, that, um-” Her hand keeps moving. They’re breathing the same air and he’s finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on anything at all.  _ That I haven’t been touched like this in awhile. _ “That-” 

Her face is getting closer to his, luminous in the kitchen light, the question already forgotten. He’s leaning in without realizing it, catches himself with his face inches from hers, pressing a hand gently to her solar plexus to keep them slightly apart. The hand holding the glass shakes. 

“Al-” His voice trembles with the confusion that must be glowing in his eyes, confusion and a little bit of want, the certainty that he’s misinterpreting this, must be misinterpreting it, misunderstanding. He sets her glass of lemonade down, his palm damp and cold from the condensation, the click of glass on countertop feeling as final as their toast had. “We never - I mean, you and I-” The sweat is running down his back and he has a horrible feeling of being out of time, of time running out. “-we never - had anything.” 

Her hand settles warmly onto his arm as her eyes glitter knowingly, the beginnings of a smirk tugging at her lips. Her face has come impossibly closer to his, and her breath ghosts over his lips when she talks. 

“Don’t you think it’s time we started?” 

Their noses bump when they kiss, faces tilted in opposite directions to meet perfectly in the middle. Alice’s lips are hot under his and he’s flooded with the sweet, rich taste of her lipstick, the demanding eagerness of her mouth. She leans up and cups his face with one warm hand, manicured nails (blue, like her skirt, like her bag, like her eyes) biting his cheek as her tongue pushes hot and insistent into his. Without breaking the kiss or even letting up for air she moves him back a half-step so that he’s pressed against the fridge, rising slightly on her toes so that he feels her long, bare legs move up against his knees. 

He has nowhere to put his hands but her hair and knows immediately that it was the right decision: she sighs pleasantly into his mouth as he combs through it with his fingers, moving his hands to her back as she pins him harder against the appliance, a knee tucked securely between his legs. His heart is beating so fast he thinks she must feel it, their chests pressed together as they kiss, his head swimming with the great enduring  _ rightness  _ of something that ought to feel wrong, that shouldn’t be happening, only her hair is so gold and the sun is so warm and the taste of lemonade is still in both their mouths, over-sweet, the way he likes it. 

_ Archie _ , his mind supplies instinctively as warning, like a pop-up on a computer screen, but it’s barely four and Archie won’t be home until six. Alice throws her arms around his neck, grips his hair, sneaks a damp kiss to the underside of his jaw, and he kisses her top lip long and hard, explores her mouth with his tongue, blood rushing so loud in his head it drowns out any noise. He hasn’t kissed Alice since Vic Mantle’s coat closet, an eventful sophomore year game of seven minutes in heaven, and there was enough liquor involved that he doesn’t remember how it felt (she reminds him always, however faintly, of the taste of cheap peach schnapps). They don’t count their one messy threesome with FP, because it doesn’t count, because he’d been touching mostly FP and they were stupid teenagers who didn’t know what they were doing. This is different. This is kissing like they mean it. 

He can feel only all of her, body hot and solid and unyielding against his front, hair honey-gold and hot from the sun, grip strong and imperturbable. Her nails dig in when she grips his skin and he feels himself surrender to her, lets her push his spine into the fridge, lips pressed endlessly to his, warm and confident and all over him. Let it never be known that Fred Andrews would say no to a blonde on a hot summer afternoon. He likes to be liked but he loves to be loved and if this isn’t love, at least it feels like it, at least she’s touching him the way no one touches him anymore. 

“Kiss me like you mean it,” says Alice, and he does, and he does, and he does. 

* * *

She leaves with her sensible low-heeled shoes dangling from her hand to make the colossally short walk of shame to her front door, and he wonders if she’ll tell anyone who asks that she was playing catch with Fred Andrews in his backyard, or if she’ll just let them think the alternative.   
  


**Author's Note:**

> for every comment fred will play catch with a neglected, abused or parentless child in this godforsaken town


End file.
